Delivery apps are the apps that take your order for cooked food or groceries, assign a rider and bring the order to your door within minutes. In India, three kinds of business make up this layer.
The first is the food delivery app. It lists hundreds of restaurants in your city. When you order, it sends the order to the restaurant, assigns a rider and shows you how many minutes the food will take. That number comes from delivery time prediction, which adds up the kitchen's cooking time, the rider's journey and the traffic.
The second is quick commerce: groceries and household items delivered in about ten minutes. The order is picked and packed in a dark store, a small warehouse close to your home that customers never enter.
The third is the cloud kitchen, a kitchen with no tables that cooks only for delivery. It sells through the food delivery apps, often under several brand names at once.
Consider a Sunday afternoon in a flat in Lucknow, when guests arrive without warning. The family orders kebabs and rumali rotis from a restaurant 5 km away, and the food delivery app shows 35 minutes. At the same moment, they order soft drinks, paper plates and ice cream from a quick commerce app, which shows 9 minutes. The ice cream arrives first. The difference is in the work. The restaurant must cook the kebabs after the order arrives. The dark store only has to take the items off a shelf.
All three businesses depend on the same two things. The first is demand forecasting, which predicts what will be ordered in each area at each hour. The second is route optimisation software, which assigns each order to a rider and plans the ride.